Entry of new communications service providers into the marketplace combined with the breakup of some state-regulated communications monopolies has resulted in increased network complexity. In particular, communications services that might once have been supplied by a single service provider may now require interaction between the individual bridge networks of multiple service providers. Pairs of provider bridge networks may be interconnected on a 1:1 basis using bridges. However, these bridges are costly, and the number of bridges required to interconnect multiple service providers in a mesh increases exponentially relative to the number of service providers. Further, the frame replicators needed to connect a large number of points limits performance.
The problem is further exacerbated because multipoint connection circuits are becoming increasingly important in provider networks as providers deploy more diverse service offerings. Existing techniques for interconnection of provider bridged networks have poor scaling properties for multipoint connection circuits. This is in part due to the limits of current technologies which have difficulty scaling the number of replicator elements required to support traffic splitting for multipoint connections and the fact that the number of possible multipoint paths grows as 2**N, where N is the number of nodes.